On the night of 4 December 1532, the Chapel at Chambéry caught fire, and the reliquary containing the Shroud was badly damaged. According to Filiberto Pingonio, who was a senior cleric at the Chapel at the time, and may have been an eye-witness, four men rescued the reliquary, but not before the precious relic within had suffered the collapse of the reliquary’s lid, and a metal strut had burnt through all thirty-two layers of the folded cloth. The sight that met their eyes was (following the reconstruction by Aldo Guerreschi) something like this:
Presumably there was also a fair amount of debris on top, and perhaps some of it was smouldering, prompting the rescuers to pour water onto, or into, the burns to stop them getting worse. This added its own stains, not without interest.
This pattern of burns and stains is repeated up to sixteen times across the unfolded cloth, each component dwindling towards non-existence down the layers, so that the sixteenth layer has quite small burn holes and only one watermark. The diagram below shows the arrangement (contrast enhanced for clarity):
Aldo Guerreschi and Michele Salcito have shown, in two studies available on shroud.com, how the cloth must have been folded to achieve this pattern. The first two folds were longitudinal, the next two transverse, and finally one third of the whole package was folded under, the edge of which coincided with the apex of the big triangular burn, which accounts for the eight little triangles and four little diamonds which form part of the same ensemble. Here is the fold pattern, with the layers from 1 to 32 labelled.
Also notable here (indicated by green lines) is a marked elongation of the cloth toward the lower righthand corner, dragging the burn/stain marks out of correspondence by 4°.
Unlike the big diamond-shaped water stains suggesting a fold pattern of more than fifty folds at some time, the water stains associated with the fire of 1532 are remarkably small. One might suppose that water poured into the burnt hole would reach the bottom and spread out, but the only visible stain on the sixteenth layer is not associated with a perforation at all, which bears further investigation. Here are the top sixteen layers, mirror-imaged where necessary so that all the marks are correctly aligned.
And here are Layers 1, 16 and 32, showing the penetration of one small watermark.
One thing which has never been investigated is the pattern of burn holes along one side of the folded cloth, where presumably it came in contact with the hot wall of the reliquary. Here is a diagram of the resulting scorches.The vertical axis is very distorted: in reality the package was about 70cm long and less than 2cm high.
Here is a better scaled diagram, to show more probable proportions.
I don’t think anything useful can be derived from this: it is only included for the sake of completion. Each of the eight sides shown in these pictures represents the outer of two layers of cloth. The equivalent inner folds show the same damage, but fainter, as would be expected. The other side of the package, comprising the centre line and the edges of the cloth, was not in contact with anything hot enough to scorch, and was unmarked by this event. There are some holes on the centre line, with dark edges perhaps associated with an oily substance such as incense, but these seem to have been made when the Shroud was unfolded, as there do not seem to be any corresponding marks anywhere else. Nearby, but apparently unconnected, is a pattern of three moisture stains, reflected approximately about the longitudinal centre line, but not also about any transverse folds – at least ask far as can be ascertained by sight. Here is a diagram of these two sets of marks, with the nearby ‘poker holes’ for reference.
The so-called “poker holes” need little further mention, except to note the exact configuration of the cloth when they were made. There are four sets of these holes, dwindling in size, presumably from top to bottom, apparently when the Shroud was folded in four, first longitudinally and then transverse. Interestingly the top two layers are about 550mm apart, while the lower two are more like 520mm.
[Diagram exaggerated to show skewed fold.]
Guerreschi and Salcito also made a fine job of demonstrating that the big rhomboid water stains down the middle of the Shroud, and their matching half-rhombi on each edge, were compatible with a double longitudinal fold and then a concertina. I mostly agree with this, although I think the second longitudinal fold occurred after the concertina, not before. Here are the stains under consideration. The faint dotted blue lines are the mirror images of the stains, showing how well (except for the ventral feet area) they match:
The picture after the first fold, however, does not suggest that a second longitudinal fold was likely here. The upper stains are much smaller than, and increasingly further apart from, their lower counterparts, which are fairly uniform in size and spacing. The dotted green line is about halfway between the top and bottom sets of stains.
If we suppose a concertina fold, starting with the ventral legs end, the fold lines would appear as shown below, and the letters would map successively on top of each other with A on top:
If the resulting package were then loosely folded in half towards A, the two stains on the first segment would map closely over one another, but the upper stains at E, and the last two segments, would have 46, 48 and 50 layers of cloth respectively to fold over, so would not reach the lower edge. This explains why the water, perhaps wicking upwards from the bottom left hand corner, as suggested by Guerreschi and Salcito, only just reaches the upper edges of the right-hand segments.
Incidentally, although Guerreschi and Salcito propose the same 52-layer result as suggested here, they give the dimensions of each layer as “about cm 32×34.” I think this is a misprint. The actual size is more like 28cm wide by 34cm high, a much more ‘portrait-shaped” rectangle than they suggest.
And so to the wax, which which provides the other most noticeable stain on the cloth, and which has been comprehensively mis-identified, even after “using high resolution photographs by Vern Miller,” as charoset stains from the Last Supper. I have commented before how Shroud 2.0 offers the opportunity for longer, more detailed study of the Shroud by students than any of the 1978 scientists were able to achieve. Here is one of the groups of splashes along the lower edge of the Shroud.
They are probably made of beeswax, which would certainly have melted in the 1532 fire. We can therefore be sure that they appeared on the Shroud after 1532 – not before, as some rather peculiar reasoning by John Jackson (whose hypothesis this is) claims. He thinks he sees a stain “at the end of a central linear matrix” “at the midpoint of the Shroud” which has “clearly” been “charred by the fire.” In fact there’s no such evidence at all.
Still, at least Jackson noticed the stains, which few others have. Here they are, along one side of the Shroud only, and each forming a diagonal line.
In my opinion they derive from candles placed some height above the Shroud, pwerhas on tall candlesticks, and are probably due to a sloping shelf to stand them on, a windy day, or being clumsily blown out. Other possibilities are no doubt… possible.